Every time I’m sick I think back to myself at about twelve, laying on the cold tile in the microscopic kitchen in our trailer. Sweaty and nauseated from fever, simultaneously hot and cold, I laid there for days. But that linoleum on my bare skin sure felt good while I coughed nearly constantly.

The memory is almost always the same: my head resting on brown shag carpet in the dim space, my eyes looking up at the nicotine-yellow ceiling of the combination kitchen-living room with Thriller on the record player. We had a Marantz Superscope that back then was way older than me. And I loved Michael Jackson — he had just released his album, but I was too sick to enjoy it and making too much noise to hear it anyway.

For almost 50 years I thought that time with bronchitis was my introduction to what must be true misery. What did I know — I was just a sick kid who got chuckles from the doctor who met an eleven year-old familiar with the word “defecate”. Since then, that time of my life has to me been legendary, but only until I realized all my memories of that illness were built on the perceptions of the person I was then.

How much of it was even real? I don’t really know now. And what does it mean that I have often compared experiences from adult life to a perception like that, ignoring the obvious: that a scared kid created the legend. For years I made conclusions about that expired memory and developed opinions about the present that influenced my grown-up life. The only evidence that there was anything unique about that illness, which for all I know now could have simply been a bad cold, is the memory of that doctor’s laughter. Was he an ER intern? I don’t know. He could have been a clinic nurse for all I know.

At least I’m beginning to understand more about myself given the misplaced reliance I had on those old memories. I guess it isn’t shocking now that I’ve wasted so much time and energy on such comparisons of my life at two different periods. Today it seems very trivial. But now that I’ve become more accepting of the obvious inaccuracies of childhood, I wonder what is the point of all those old memories, anyway?